Where to From Here

Future Directions for TMC

Thoughts of the Current President,

Bron D. Skinner

November,
2013

Ever since we began the process of
reinvigorating the organization of the Triangle Men’s Center (TMC) back in
April of this year, I have been ruminating about our purpose. It was clear that
the machinery of the TMC had become overgrown with disuse and rusty with
inattention. So the first order of business was clear. We needed to breathe new
life into the operational structure that supports our work and focuses the
energies needed to fulfill our mission of service to men.

To that end much has been
accomplished. A governing Board is now in place and a new slate of officers has
taken charge of the TMC business. The members of the Board have accomplished a
number of important tasks:

•A new
name has been chosen which TMC membership has approved. Henceforth, TMC will
stand for The Men’s Council. The paperwork is on its way through official
channels with offices of the state and federal governments to finalize this
change.

•The
TMC website has received a complete overhaul, thanks to Jim Neill and Larry
Sorkin (themenscouncil.org).
We have new web masters (Larry Sorkin and Jim share those duties) so we can now
keep the information that appears on our website current and relevant to what
TMC is doing. There are still things to be done to improve what is offered
there, but the revision and update has been a refreshing change. The resources
are growing rapidly.

•The
bylaws governing the TMC are in the process of being revised. When this is
completed the operational guidelines for keeping the organization functional
will be in place.

•The
Board has conducted a retreat to address the Mission and Vision of the TMC and
that work is now reflected in what you will find on the TMC website.

However, for me these steps represent
a necessary, but only partially satisfying, set of accomplishments. I did not
set out to simply breathe life back into a languishing organization by relying
on “what we have always done.” We have derived great benefit from the mythopoetic,
Native American, and Jungian based traditions and writings to explore fresh,
previously unknown territories of feeling and thinking. It was through the
doors opened by honoring these ways of thinking that we have been able to
travel from the dry, arid landscape that we had been left to live in by the
absence or abuse of our fathers and other important male figures in our lives,
our habitual denial of emotions, and the false definitions of our masculinity
that a patriarchal society tends to leave men with. In place of that landscape
we were able to find the courage to create safe containers for connection, to
define new rules for relating to one another, and to descend into warm, dank,
dark, previously unexplored places of our souls and begin to own more complete
understandings of what being masculine has to offer us, other men, our female
counterparts and society in general. That work has served to provide a vast
array of treasures to nurture our personal development, and continues to serve
as the basis for the success of our annual Gathering, ongoing projects, like
the Joshua Project, support groups around NC, and the work of men around the
country in other active organizations that are providing men with opportunities
for increased self understanding and self worth. So we need to continue doing
what we have been doing.

At the same time I worry that the
effectiveness of using only these traditions to impel the “men’s movement” (if
there ever was such a thing) to grow has possibly diminished. Charismatic leaders,
like Robert Bly and Michael Meade, had particular talents for story telling and
an almost magical ability to create sacred spaces and containers where men
could feel safe to be vulnerable. Their presence on the national scene sparked
enough interest to suggest that there was such a thing as an active men’s
movement and entice people like Bill Moyers to do some in-depth reporting on
the subject. Today these figures have stepped out of the limelight and no
comparable personalities are on the national stage with the same power to
incite today’s men to seek what they unconsciously most hunger for and to
entice them into actions that risk challenging the status quo of their lives. For me this has been a major point of
concern, and as the first President of the newly minted version of the Triangle
Men’s Center (before the Raleigh Men’s Center) now to be known as The Men’s
Council, I feel it incumbent upon me to try and address it. It is unlikely that
we will see leaders of our work in the future that will provide the same kind
of energy that Bly and Meade have. But organizations like ours can make a
difference in continuing the positive directions begun when people like them
did hold sway. The question is though: In today’s complex world how can TMC
best direct its resources and energies to effect the most positive change on
the most critical issues that affect men’s physical, mental, psychological and
spiritual health?

Background.
To start to answer that question it might help to reflect on some history. For many
of us men’s work as we know it began about 30 years ago. The women’s movement
and feminism was in full swing and the effects of organizations like NOW and
national figures like Betty Friedan were being felt politically and socially
across the country. The radical changes we were seeing in the women we had
relationships with began to have an effect on us.

We grew to understand that the
societal definitions of maleness had placed constraints on men as profoundly
limiting as those that women experienced. But as males we had a harder time
than women in achieving an upgrade of consciousness that could promote our
willing change. After all, as males our role in the centuries of patriarchy
that women were rebelling against was one of power and privilege. Acceding to
the demands for change that feminist thought was suggesting meant that we
needed to be willing to step aside from a position of entitlement provided at
birth to males and share it with our female partners in ways we had never
conceived before.

The first stage of our work was to
engage a process to raise to a new level of consciousness our emotional selves
and discover the bonds of brotherhood that civilization had taught us to ignore
outside the venues of war and sports competition. We had to learn how to trust
our full range of emotions, not just our anger and rage, and to turn to our
brothers, our fellow males, when we were emotionally needy, to be willing to be
vulnerable and not have to look tough and invincible all the time. We had to be
willing to let it be known that we were capable of weeping and experiencing
grief. We had to learn how to find comfort in the embrace of those who best
understood how we felt about being in the world–other males. We had to do this
while we were overcoming our societal prohibitions about loving other men and
letting them know that we had those deep and enduring emotions that come with
brotherhood.

We accomplished this work in a number
of ways. As individuals we sought opportunities to connect with other men in
support groups, weekend and longer retreats, drumming, writing and reading
poetry. We took the risk of joining other men in hugs and sweat lodges. We
listened without judgment as men read their poetry, both inspired and
uninspired, and unveiled the most intimate secrets of their souls. We learned
how to trust our own hearts and those of our companions on the journey. We
learned to welcome the pain of grief and the opportunities for connection that
came with comforting our brothers in their pain and sorrow. We learned what
authenticity means in our selves and others.

Sometimes we get a fleeting bit of
proof that we have possibly learned our lessons well. Men who took the time in
October to participate in planning for next year’s Gathering will all tell you
that it was a very special experience. Reports from participants at the last
retreat of the Joshua Project indicate that a deep level of connection and
sharing marked the occasion. Gatherings in recent years have left warm memories
of time well spent with a company of men who have taken extraordinary paths to
self understanding.

We seem now to be able to move into
these spaces of sharing and emotional freedom with ease and at will. The years
of effort to connect with one another and to be authentic in our support
groups, retreats and personal therapy seem finally to have borne fruit. Many of
the wounds that we carried have been healed or we have learned how to live
peacefully with them. Hopefully, much of our denial has been laid aside so that
honesty is more or less the norm. Many of us have faced our shadow selves and
found a way to integrate rather than deny their existence. Now more than ever I
am prompted to wish that every man that I know could experience what we create
when we come together. What we have to offer has value and is worth making
available to the world. It is so rich I have to wonder why we have not
attracted a wider audience than we have; why has what we do not become a real
movement of national, perhaps world wide, significance?

My sense is that we have become
something we only vaguely felt was possible to become when we began our work
together 30 years ago. I think we yearned to be what we have become together.
But like the caterpillar that does not know its own potential butterfly, we had
no clue what the end result might be. Our personal work is by no means
complete. We are still the flawed human beings we were 30 years ago. But now we
are perhaps wiser, hopefully less addicted to feeding our egos, and just
possibly more conscious beings than we were then.

The
Future Work. More importantly, the work to raise men’s consciences is far
from done. The world is in pain and distress. I think that men need to learn
what we take for granted about being men more than possibly at any other time
in the history of civilization. I would like to see The Men’s Council be an
important resource for men who are coming into a conscious awareness of what
their part is going to be in making the world a better place, just as those who
began the Raleigh Men’s Center did three decades ago. I would like to see the
organization provide the opportunities that men will need for another three
decades to follow a path to personal healing and redemption through the
discovery of those lost and damaged parts of themselves that are a result of
familial and societal experiences and cultural norms. What I don’t know is how
to do that.

The reality is that we are living in
a very different time from when “men’s work” was in its infancy. In 1983 when I
began with a support group to explore my masculinity, personal computers were
just making their appearance as interesting adult playthings, like the
Commodore 64 or, like the Apple II, as experimental items in offices. There was
no internet. Cell phones were not widely available. The interoffice memo still
had not been superseded by electronic mail and AOL made a lot of money
providing email to those without access at work. Most offices still used
typewriters to conduct their business. Word processors were specialized devices
that needed trained operators.

With such a radically different world
to work in I believe that what we did to get us from 1983 to now cannot be
replicated, nor will it, I believe, be effective to try to do so. I doubt
seriously that we can expect to attract the wealth of participation the world
needs with acknowledgment of our ancient ancestral roots, drumming, poetry and
story telling. I don’t think that we should give those up. They have served us
well and continue to provide the foundation for our coming together. But now I
think we might be ready, and probably need, to consider a broadening of what we
do to address societal and cultural issues that go beyond the personal level
that we have concentrated on to this point. If we want TMC to be relevant and
capable of attracting men interested in the task of self examination, we
probably need to look at what young and middle-aged men in their most
productive years are currently confronting as they try to fulfill their
designated male roles.

Here are some themes that we see in
the news almost every day that were rarely, if ever, a part of a news cycle 30
years ago:

•Young men acting out their pain in unspeakable
acts of violence. The all too common stories involving someone with an assault
rifle or other fire arm in a public place, first killing and then being killed,
frequently involve a young man with a history of mental health problems.

•Stories about bullying that have led to terrible
and avoidable consequences.

•The appalling numbers of men, especially men of
color, incarcerated for possession and use of recreational drugs.

•The shocking numbers of male veterans who have
chosen to end their lives rather than continue to fight the demons that have
come back with them from the battle fields.

•Massive changes in society’s attitudes toward
the rights of LGBT members of society to live their lives in the open.

•Stories that highlight the instability of the
world with war always a distinct possibility.

•Stories about how women now make up over half
college student bodies and are in unprecedented numbers the main bread winner
families around the country.

•An economic scenario that makes job security a
thing of the past. National debates about public policy that make the promises
of security in retirement, affordable and accessible health care, and safety
nets doubtful for the foreseeable future.

•A jaw-dropping increase in the gap between the
annual incomes and proportion of the nation’s wealth found in the most wealthy
members of society compared to everyone else.

•Stories about the effects of climate change that
promise possibly to obviate the need for concern about any other issue, no
matter its importance for a more stable world.

I am sure in my list that I have
skipped one of your favorite issues. There are many, many issues that men today
must confront that were quite different 30 years ago. If TMC is going to be
effective in helping men to experience the fulfillment of being men in a
changing world, we are going to need to find ways to address these issues and
to provide men with ways to engage the world with emotional candor and with as
fully operational psyches as possible. It is only with all the resources of the
King, Warrior, Magician and Lover that each of us carries in our souls that we
can hope to deal with the complexities that are confronting us in the world to
come.

I want to posit a challenge to all
men to join me in determining how we can best act now to help the next
generation of men to do the work needed to manifest these energies in their
lives and the world around them. I want to invite you to become active with us
in men’s work. If you have not yet, join a support group. Come to a TMC
Gathering of Men. Become a member of The Men’s Council. (Currently you can do
so for just $10.) If you have ideas for grander ways of reaching out to men of
all ages through educational programs, we are looking for ideas you might have.
It is through our combined efforts as a community of men that we can hope to
have the most profound impact on the world.